There will be 560 more seats on offer for students taking the common admission test (CAT) for admission to the Indian Institutes of Management this year, reports Swaha Sahoo.

There will be 560 more seats on offer for students taking the common admission test (CAT) for admission to the Indian Institutes of Management this year.

Human resource development ministry sources said the CAT committee for 2009 had been asked to include these additional seats.

The cabinet had cleared the setting up of four new IIMs — in Tiruchirappalli (Tamil Nadu), Ranchi (Jharkhand), Raipur (Chhattisgarh) and Rohtak (Haryana) — in August.

But the institutes are yet to be established.

Each of the new IIMs is supposed to admit 140 students. The directors of some of the existing IIMs are believed to have objected, saying these many seats will be too much for a new institute to manage.

“The older IIMs will help the new institutes decide the content of the academic courses, but only after the new directors are appointed,” said a government official.

While the ministry has called for applications, it is yet to form a panel to appoint directors to the new IIMs.

The ministry has also been unable to finalise temporary infrastructure for setting up the new institutes — except for IIM Rohtak, which will initially get a campus at the Maharishi Dayanand University.

CAT 2009 will be held from November 28 to December 7. The announcement for the exam had not mentioned the new IIMs.